Western donor money is silencing LGBT+ activists in Uganda, study finds
Ugandan LGBT+ organizations are using social media to promote themselves and provide services, but not to challenge the oppressive laws and beliefs that actually harm their communities. The problem: dependency on international funding forces them to adopt Western-style messaging rather than locally resonant activism, limiting their real-world impact.
Originaltitel: Challenging the local logics of oppression in times of post-colonial amnesia – a study of Ugandan LGBT+ activism in digital media spaces
<p>Against the backdrop of an increasingly repressive environment, the study explores to what degree five established LGBT+ organizations use self-controlled digital spaces, Twitter and Facebook, during one month in 2022 to expose and challenge constructs that rationalize oppression of Ugandan LGBT+. The analysis revealed that digital media spaces were not used to challenge the local logics of oppression or contemporary processes sustaining oppression. Instead, spaces, often displaying a conspicuously uniform Western sexual rights language, focused on providing digital services and/or notification of offline services to the community and promoting the individual organization. The adoption of Western sexual rights campaign language, including using LGBT+ as identity labels to communicate Ugandan same-sex desires and gender identities, could be explained by the community’s dependency on international resources. The study’s contribution lies in its astute reminder – that the realization of digital spaces’ emancipatory potential is dependent on the political economy of the activists' context.</p>